Are you safer now than you were four years ago?

Eliot Cohen is the distinguished military historian and scholar of civilian-military relations who is now advising Mitt Romney on issues of national security. Yesterday the Washington Post opened its pages to him to answer a question adapted from Ronald Reagan in his debate with Jimmy Carter: “Are you safer than you were four years ago?” He writes:

Set aside the opening follies of this administration, such as the cringe-inducing “reset” button given to Russia’s foreign minister that yielded no cooperation but managed to produce anti-American venom from Vladimir Putin and the harassment of our ambassador to Moscow by thugs in Putin’s youth movement.

Set aside the hypocrisy of the Obama team’s scorn at former governor Mitt Romney’s lack of foreign policy experience, given that its own candidate, during his two years in the Senate prior to his presidential campaign, managed to produce one large goof: contemptuous certainty that the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq in 2007 would fail.

Set aside even the unseemliness of the president blaming America’s failures abroad on the George W. Bush administration while claiming credit for operations whose foundations were laid during the Bush presidency.